


He Walked With Dreams and Darkness

by stella_bella



Category: Merlin (TV), Parked (2010)
Genre: Angst, Crossover, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 22:40:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Merlin is reincarnated as Cathal O'Regan, a 21st-century Dublin teenager, who wakes up one morning and remembers who he is and what he has lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Walked With Dreams and Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Sad Later](https://archiveofourown.org/works/384074) by [dustyfluorescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustyfluorescent/pseuds/dustyfluorescent). 



> Many thanks to Inkeri/snakesinthetardis for letting me play in her sandbox. If you haven't read any of her fic yet, you really, really should.
> 
> Title from the poem "Merlin and Vivien", the sixth part of "The Idylls of the King", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Posted without a beta or Brit-pick; feel free to comment with any mistakes.

The sun rises, and he remembers.

It is an ordinary day, a Wednesday, and there are soft grey clouds building to a drizzle. His alarm is set for six, because there is school later, but he doesn’t need it, not today, not when he wakes suddenly, falling from a great cold height, and remembers.

Each time it takes longer, comes later. Leaves him shaking and pale, sick with panic that one day he will live a whole life, start to finish, and not ever know.

For now, though, he remembers, and that is enough.

\--

Dublin is bright and cold this late in the year, a rare day of sunshine. The slap of air makes him suck in a breath, cheeks hollowing with the icy throb in his throat and lungs. He has walked this way before, and the memories overlap, out of order; yesterday, dull light and him huddled inside a coat, dragging his feet; many years ago, toddling along and pretending he was a dragon in the frosty air, tugging on his mum’s hand to make her see. Now though, at the thought of a dragon, words spring unbidden to his lips, words in a language that doesn’t exist anymore, that maybe never did. He shapes them soundlessly, tentative, and then sure and strong. No matter what he does, whisper, murmur, dare to speak out loud when there are no passers-by within earshot, there is no power behind them. They are just words, frozen in his throat by the cold and the unshed tears, but he repeats them anyway, over and over.

The day goes quickly, his thoughts focused inwards, sorting out which memories belong to him and which to the life he’s been handed this time around. Someone calls out during the passing time, knocks him on the shoulder and grins. He’s startled, manages a weak smile and a half-shrug. Cathal. That’s his name. _Cathal._ He rolls the syllables around during maths, trying them out, trying to see if they fit.

\---

Two nights later he steals a cigarette from his father and lights it up on the windowsill, leaning out into the damp air to exhale. His fingers tap the ledge, restless, a pattern that starts and stops and starts again in fits. The smoke helps to fill the void, the howling emptiness where magic used to live, just behind his heart. It amazes him, in a detached sort of way, that he spent seventeen years in this life without any idea. Perhaps he’s making up for it now. He studies the sky in between inhales, but it is clouded and yellow-grey with reflected light. He might not recognise the stars anyway. It’s been a long time.

Habits develop; coping mechanisms. He bites his fingernails to the quick, chews his lips and taps his foot at the dinner table, on the bus, in class. The redhead next to him frowns, glares, and sighs in turn, tossing her hair and silently willing his foot into submission. He ignores her.

Every day after school, he walks the narrow streets and the back alleys, climbs the paths in the parks above the city, and searches. Every time he sees a light-headed bloke in the next aisle at the grocery or stood ahead of him at a crosswalk, he holds his breath as if he could once again stop time. It never lasts. It’s never him.

\---

And then one day it is, pickup game of football in a park, small circle of children and indulgent parents, teenaged girls with giggles hidden behind hands and flirtatious smiles.

Arthur is there, front and center, scoring with a ruthless efficiency that belies the casual nature of the game. He turns, grinning, and pumps a fist in the air. Some muscled dark-haired bloke slaps him on the back, lets out a cheer.

Merlin stands and watches, the flood of relief giving way to desire, and maybe Arthur can sense it too, that shift in the fabric of the world, maybe there is still a little magic left, because he turns and sees. And stops.

And then the whole world stops, and starts again faster than before, and they are there at the centre, where they have always been.

\---

They fuck on Cathal’s bed, worn sheets crumpled and shoved to the bottom. He bites his lips to keep in his moans, squeezes Arthur’s hands tight enough to bruise. Arthur kisses him the whole time, lips on his collarbone, his neck, his jaw, breathing life and warmth and memory right into his skin.

He’s still sweaty from the game, grass blades caught in his hair, sticking to his leg, and Merlin revels in the smell of summer sun and damp grass and Arthur. He clutches at Arthur’s back, pleads with his hands and voice and mouth, and the dark dark blue of his eyes urges Arthur deeper, harder, faster, more, _now_ and finally, finally, he is whole.

Afterwards, they lie still, tangled in each other and the unmoored sheet. Merlin smokes, letting the blue haze drift towards the ceiling. For once there is a stillness inside, the space behind his heart not quite so hollow.

He offers Arthur a drag, but Arthur declines with a half-grin. He has to keep fit; he plays on a well-respected football team at the poshest private school in Dublin with scouts keeping tabs on him like a film star. Cathal’s brother joined the army right out of secondary school, paycheck and pension guaranteed.

Merlin shrugs and inhales, turning onto his back and picturing Arthur on a pitch instead of a tourney field, closing his eyes as Arthur runs a warm calloused hand up his side, stroking a thumb over his ribs.

In the quiet of late afternoon, Merlin tells him about the magic, words slow to come, staring at the ceiling as though they might be written there. The cigarette goes unnoticed between his fingers until Arthur takes it, stubs it out on the nightstand. Rolls back to face Merlin and gathers him in his arms, kisses his tangled hair, spreads warm hands over his bony shoulders and narrow back. Lets Merlin sob into his chest.

The sun sinks behind the row houses across the street, and Arthur finally stirs, untangling himself from Merlin, stuck together as they are with sweat and tears and come. He dresses in the growing dimness, and Merlin wraps his hand in the limp sheets and bites his tongue. Arthur kisses him, hand gripping the back of Merlin’s head, and it tastes of desperation. It’s never enough, all these lives they’ve lived, young and old, magic and not, England and America and Brazil, Lisbon and Gdansk and Tokyo. All these years and lives and names, and none of it is enough.

His fingers start up their fitful twitching in Arthur’s wake, and Merlin staggers to the shower to rinse the smell of them from his skin, opens the window on his way to let the damp air do the same to his room. He climbs wet-haired and shivering to the roof, chain-smoking from a stolen pack and flicking the butts into his neighbour’s yard.

Cathal’s father comes home when it is newly dark, slamming first the car door and then the house door. His mother follows moments later, bundled up in her winter coat and scarf even though it’s just October.

The cold has seeped into Merlin, ice in his veins and frost crackling along his bones. He listens to the clatter of dinner plates and the muffled conversation, the splash of water in the sink as warm yellow light spills in a distorted rectangle onto the back garden.

He smokes his last cigarette slowly, hoarding the flame in cupped hands, his fingers so numb he cannot feel the heat. The light from the kitchen goes out, and still he sits, cigarette now gone, hoarding instead the memory of Arthur’s touch, the warmth of his smile. They have found each other, as they always do, and now it remains to see how long they will have.

Merlin clambers through the window when he’s sure the house is asleep, legs stiff and uncooperative, almost pitching him headfirst off the narrow ledge. He collapses into bed, jeans and all, and buries his face in the pillow, chilled from the night air but still smelling of Arthur. He smells the same way, every time, and there is some comfort in that.

He curls around the pillow, his mind unrelenting despite the lateness of the hour, and wonders how much time they have. Ireland, twenty-first century, middle of an economic depression. No magic. The ache starts up again, behind his ribs. He thinks it might not be that long.

\---

Arthur tells him his name is George this time around. Merlin never calls him that.

Instead, he moans _Arthur_ into the sheets, arms braced and shaking, Arthur’s weight warm against his back. He whispers it into Arthur’s hair, sweat-soaked and rumpled, while they drowse cramped in a bed made for one. He murmurs it into golden skin, slick with salt, kisses it into the hipbones, the knees, the throat of the man he knows better than himself. He says it at night, spoken to the darkness when he is alone and their schedules or parents or the universe in general conspire to keep it that way. He mouths it damply into his pillow, still smelling faintly of them underneath the detergent.

And Arthur never calls him Cathal either. He calls out _Merlin_ instead; worried, when Merlin sits unmoving in the chill of a late spring, fingers pale and lips blue, fidgeting on the designated bench well past the designated time, eyes far away and hollowed from within, cigarette butts littering the ground around him. He calls joyfully, when Merlin rounds the corner by his street, wearing a crooked smile and a blue scarf, hair mussed by the warming breeze. He whispers it like a spell when Merlin cups his face and kisses him into the grass or the sheets, folds his limbs over Arthur’s and breathes into his skin.

\---

Every time he comes back there is a learning curve. Where is he, what year, is he old, young, employed, alone. Does he have a family, a girlfriend or boyfriend or sister; is he an artist, a dockworker, a journalist, a till worker. He has been all of those and more, and now for the first time, he is a student. Or was.

He starts cutting class, meeting Arthur in alleyways, and libraries; at the sports centre, in parks, and - rarely - in their respective bedrooms when no one is home. Merlin is an addict, and Arthur is his drug; his hands on Merlin’s hips, his teeth on Merlin’s neck, his hair in Merlin’s hands. Arthur fills the hollow inside of Merlin, and Merlin can breathe when they are together.

He tries to explain what the loss of magic does to him, somewhere between a missing limb and a meth addiction, but Arthur only frowns, worried hands already reaching for him, calloused hands that he folds over narrow, bitten fingers that flutter and tap and pick and are never still anywhere else. Arthur doesn’t know, can’t know, but the fact that he tries makes all the difference. Merlin doesn’t tell him exactly how dependent he is, how panicked when Arthur tells him one day that he is going away on holiday for three weeks in July. He doesn’t say a word, but for the next few months before he leaves, Arthur finds every excuse to touch, and that brings a smile, long overdue, to Merlin’s face.

\---

The bloke is tall and grey-haired, nobody’s grandda in a white van. He sells Merlin his first gram on a discount, which is a good job since there wasn’t very much cash in his father’s wallet.

Merlin tucks the brown paper slip into his pocket, feels its featherweight like an anvil all the way back. Arthur’s been away for eight days.

The car park on the coast road is usually empty, and for lack of a better place, he goes there. He sits on the curb, trainers akimbo on the gritty pavement, and pulls his stash out with shaking fingers. It’s not even cold; high summer here in the north, and his thin t-shirt flutters in the salty breeze.

The lighter takes three tries to ignite, and the spoon trembles in his hand. He watches the flame blacken one of mum’s silver soupspoons, watches the powder melting brown and thick. When he draws it into the syringe, his hand is steady.

The setting sun turns his feet golden orange, flames writhing from the vein between his toes, climbing up his leg and racing along his veins; fire in his heart and lungs, burning out the hole behind his heart. He collapses back onto the stiff grass, syringe falling to the pavement, closing his eyes against the heat that roars louder and burns through him and over him and explodes.

Time passes.

The seagulls have returned to their roosts; lights glitter on the harbor waves. It’s very late. Merlin comes back to himself slowly, fingers twitching as his limbs return. He stares for a moment at his shoeless foot before his brain clicks over, slow and sparking unevenly. He takes an eternity to get the shoe back on, and the spoon is made of neutron star atoms and getting it into his pocket again is an effort.

He stumbles home, dazed; nearly gets run down once or twice. He doesn’t care.

\---

Nine more days. The numbers don’t feel painful anymore. Nine days. He can make it.

\---

They meet on a pier in Dublin harbour, seagulls obscuring their voices. The lateness of the day means no fishermen and the lateness of the season means no tourists or optimistic locals. The waves are grey-blue, choppy and flecked with white that flashes in the sun. It’s still fairly warm but the breeze is cool; summer is slipping away.

Merlin leans on the wooden railing, feels Arthur settle in next to him, arms barely touching. He studies Arthur out of the corner of his eye, noticing the tan picked up from his holiday, the shaggy ends of hair that will have to be dealt with before school starts.

Arthur licks his lips, says, “Did you ever notice that we always look the same?” Merlin laughs, closing his eyes against the sun.

“I do have eyes, you know,” Merlin protests, and then considers, “I’d know you no matter what you looked like. You’re stuck with me.” Arthur snorts.

“What if I came back as a girl?” He nudges Merlin with his elbow, and Merlin goes with it, grin threatening to turn into helpless laughter.

“Even then, you prat. You’d make a very pretty girl.” He turns to look at Arthur, smiling back but something underneath, and Merlin sighs and faces the water again.

All of their conversations have layers and layers, things unsaid but understood, and Merlin nearly asks right there, just blurts it, exactly how many lives and names and versions of them will they have to live before they admit that each time they come back they are more fucked up.

Arthur is silent beside him for once, and Merlin doesn’t chance a look. Some things are better left unsaid.

\---

The house is dark when Merlin returns, and he exhales a mite shakily.

The back door creaks if it’s opened too wide, so he sidles through a narrow gap and then turns to bolt the door behind him, fingers as careful as he can make them. He’s turning to the stairs - the fourth one from the bottom creaks - when Cathal’s mother speaks from the living room.

She is sitting in her favourite chair, blending into the darkness. “It’s nearly two in the morning. Where have you been?” Her words are measured, as though she’d spent the last several hours practising on the mantlepiece, the softly ticking clock.

Merlin clears his throat, wincing at the loudness, and says, “Out,” immediately tacking on, “With mates.” It’s easy to forget, but right here and now she is Mum and he is Cathal, her youngest son, who inexplicably stopped speaking to her or the rest of the family, started staying out all day and half the night; whose grades hover just north of abysmal and whose scarves and coat collars and slouches fail to disguise the swollen lips and mouth-shaped bruises on his neck, the reek of cigarettes and cannabis and sex.

She pads across the floor, reaching for him as he turns in a last ditch attempt for the stairs. “Cathal, please. I never see you anymore.” The plea breaks his heart. He lets her gently turn him around, place a hand carefully on his cheek. He leans away, fingers clutching at the banister behind. “Are you all right?”

And he wants to tell her, a torrent of words pressing against his teeth, jumbled-up explanations of his life - his lives - and Arthur, and the magic in his soul and how, in its absence, his skin might flake off and his mind explode at any given moment.

Instead he grips her hand and gently lifts it off his face, kisses her bony fingers with dry lips. “I’m fine, mum. Honestly.” She smells of lavender, and in the faint glow from the street lights, her eyes glisten.

Merlin waits a moment, and then when the silence stretches on, he disentangles their fingers and walks up the stairs. When he closes his door, she’s still at the bottom, hand to her face.

That night he dreams of Ealdor, and Hunith smiles from the doorway of their cottage, but no matter how fast he runs, he never quite reaches her.

\---

He’s drifting on the edge of sleep when a sound jerks him back from the edge. He lies still, heart racing, frozen in an indecision of ignore or panic, run or stay.

Then he hears it again, and there is definitely someone outside his window. They don’t exactly live in a bad section of the city, but really they’re only about three streets away. His father always locks the doors and windows, even in the summer.

Merlin stares at the wall, trembling from adrenaline, calculating the distance from his bed to the closet where he knows there’s a cricket bat somewhere near the bottom, when someone knocks on his window and whisper-shouts his name.

Of course.

He lets Arthur in, along with the cold air, and tries very hard not to laugh. “Honestly, Arthur. Only you would think of climbing the entire side of my house rather than picking up the bloody phone.”

Arthur shrugs, grins a bit manically. “Left my mobile at home and I was out walking when I thought of you.” Merlin shuts the window, shaking his head. “You mean you were out walking and fancied a shag.”

Arthur steps close, tugging on Merlin’s crossed arms, and smiles. “Yeah, well.” He slides his hands up to cup Merlin’s face, stroking his roughened thumbs along the sharp edges of cheekbone there, and kisses Merlin softly. He pulls away, barely, whispers, “Maybe I just fancied you.” And Merlin unfolds his arms and crushes them together, closes his eyes and lets Arthur tug him to the bed, lets him pull off his clothes and press kisses into his sleep-smelling skin and tug on his hair.

Arthur fucks him slow, face to face and trembling, and Merlin pulls his head down over and over for wet messy kisses that more or less hide their gasps and moans.

In the stillness of the night, every sheet rustle, every choked breath and bedspring creak is amplified, and Merlin imagines what would happen if Cathal’s mum woke up for a drink and caught him being fucked on his bed in her house in the middle of the night. Arthur sucks a bruise into his neck then, so he stops imagining and lets himself fall, over and over again.

Arthur stays as long as he can, which is not long enough. Merlin feels the cold air brush his skin when Arthur peels away, sliding his fingers out from between Merlin’s and clumsily tucking the blankets around Merlin’s naked back.

He dresses by touch in the dark, and raises the window slowly. The wash of cold air makes Merlin shiver, despite their lingering shared warmth trapped by the covers. Arthur whispers, “I’ll see you later, yeah?” And Merlin nods, black mop brushing the pillowcase.

“Yeah. Later.”

Arthur doesn’t manage to shut the window all the way, and the air that seeps in chills the entire room. Merlin falls asleep shivering.

\---

He wakes up before dawn, steel grey light washing the eastern sky.

He is cold, fingers numb where they clutch white-knuckled at the blanket. He knows.

Dawn spreads, lightening the sky to a soft pearl. Rain patters on the street outside. He doesn’t move, because now there is no reason to, there is nothing to be done.

He is still in bed when the phone rings downstairs. His mum answers, and over the panicked thud of his heart he cannot hear anything but a low murmur. The conversation is short. He is still in bed when she knocks, opening the door without waiting for a response and nudging a battered pair of trainers and a crooked stack of cds out of the way. She crosses to his bed, for once quiet on the state of the floor and the overflowing closet, the pack of cigarettes in plain sight on his bureau.

She sits carefully on the end of the bed, touches his blanket-shrouded foot as though it is made of glass. Tells.

She lifts her hand, eyes downcast, and stands slowly. If she’s waiting for him to say something, he disappoints. She pauses on the way out to close his window. His foot is cold, and he barely hears the door click shut, softly, like you'd leave a hospital room where there's nothing to be done. It doesn’t matter. He knows. He knew, has always known, and will always and forever know the exact precise moment in time when he is alone again.

\---

He doesn’t go to the funeral. What’s the point? He’s seen Arthur die a hundred, maybe a thousand different ways since the first, and every service, no matter how formal or heartfelt, doesn’t do him justice. No one knows, really knows, who he is and what he’s done, what he’s meant to do. Only Merlin, and Merlin buried him once, set him adrift on a lake already fading from the solid reality of this world; let his body float into the mist. Buried him with a sword, his sword, the only one left in the world like it. Once is enough. _Take me up, cast me away._ He cannot do it again.

There’s an obituary in the paper, and he reads it against his better judgment. It’s full of anecdotes from friends and family, the usual histrionics when someone dies young with potential unrealised. It doesn’t mention Cathal. Doesn’t say why Arthur happened to be on that particular road at four in the morning, a bad section of Dublin if ever there was one, and him never one to wear the ratty pair of jeans or last year’s coat.

Merlin knows that street. It’s less than half a mile from his house as the crow flies. He’s bought drugs there. It’s also a shortcut from his house to the river and then to the other side of Dublin, where Arthur lives, in a grand house on a hill. He’s walked it himself at four in the morning, skin marked with Arthur’s hands and lips and love, buried under layers of worn clothes against the chill.

His mum finds him at the table, tea cold and head sunk in his trembling hands. She makes him a new cup, sits across him in the stiff wooden chair, and covers his hands with her own. “Oh, love.” Her voice is soft.

He drops tears onto the tabletop, little puddles that shimmer in the overhead light, and her voice is soothing over the endless screaming void inside his head, the litany of _my fault, my fault, it is always my fault._

Night has fallen when he gathers himself and stands, tea again cold and her not even started on supper. He mutters something about going for a walk, and she sits helpless as he slips out the back door, hops the garden wall, with no hat or gloves or even a scarf.

He carries that picture of her, forlorn at the table, hands empty before her, and wonders that her eyes have become so shadowed in the last few months, her fingers so thin that she cannot wear her rings.

He goes to That Street, waits just outside the yellow circle of light around the streetlamp. He doesn’t have any cash, but Frank knows him. Squeezes his shoulder friendly-like and gives him the little paper package on credit.

The car park is the only place he can think of to go, and he sits and stares until the glitter of lights on the black water fades into a blur. His tears leave frozen tracks on his cheek.

When he shoots up, still aware enough to use his feet, he wishes fiercely that he wouldn’t wake up.

\---

Things happen fast, now.

Merlin stays out, buying heroin when he can and smoking constantly when he can’t. He lifts a purse from an unlocked car, uses the bank card to withdraw as much as he can. Ignores the guilt and reasons that people who don’t want their money taken shouldn’t write their PIN on the card itself.

One night he’s frozen almost to the bone and home is a long way off, so he breaks into a car and sleeps there, on the backseat in between old coffee cups and newspapers, the smell of dead leaves.

The next time he steals, he uses a metal shim and cleans out the glove box.

\---

When he comes home after nearly four days abroad, his mum is waiting. She makes him tea, hands trembling so badly that he takes the kettle from her for fear. She makes him sit down, take the tea.

She tells him what the doctors told her, that it’s too advanced for surgery or chemo. That she can only wait.

She is the one who gets up first this time, who climbs the stairs as though they are a mountain, who shuts the door to her room so softly it almost isn’t a reprimand.

Merlin stares into space until he hears his father’s car. Then he runs.

\---

He goes to her funeral.

It’s the least he can do. His father wouldn’t let him in the room at the end, so he sat on the plastic chair in the hallway outside, paced the shiny tiles when he couldn’t sit any longer. Made his lips bleed from biting.

When his da reappeared in the doorway, a decade older, Merlin turned without a word and left.

\---

His da is sat at the kitchen table one morning when Merlin comes in after sunup. There’s a letter from the school in front of him.

Merlin sits across from him, but he doesn’t look up.

“They’ve expelled you. Said you haven’t been in four months.”

Merlin’s forgotten about school. He’s far too old for it.

“This was your last year. I thought you might hold on for her sake. Might make something--” He breaks off, throat closing around the words.

When he speaks again, there is no trace of emotion. “You’re eighteen in two weeks. I want you gone after that.”

The clock ticks on the mantle in the other room, and Merlin feels nothing. His father hasn’t even lifted his head to look him in the eyes once.

“She asked for you, at the end. Patrick was there; got leave from the army. But you couldn’t be arsed to show up and say goodbye to your own mother.” Merlin can’t speak for a moment, for an eternity of pain.

Then he croaks, fingers spreading desperately onto the table to brace himself. “ ‘Couldn’t be arsed…?’ Da, I was _there_ , I tried. You wouldn’t let me in, you wouldn’t let me see her!” Tears rise, and he fights them.

His father finally looks up, looks through him to the wallpaper behind.

“You didn’t deserve to see her.”  He stands and leaves the letter on the table, leaves his son shell-shocked next to it.  

“I want you gone.”

\---

Merlin doesn’t wait two weeks. He packs his things and leaves the next day when his dad’s at work. Takes his mother’s car, her little yellow two-door that she said was cute and the rest of them called that fuckin’ banana.

He drives to the river and smokes, flicking the ash out the window and not thinking. He celebrates his eighteenth birthday with an inhaler of cannabis and a needle of heroin. Lets himself get lost, disappear under the rush, get pulled under.

For the next few years he drifts, stealing money for drugs and sleeping in his car in various empty lots. He spends two weeks near a warehouse, a handful of days by a factory until a gang shows up one night and retakes their territory. Sometimes he stays with friends, the few he’s kept, crashing on threadbare couches and boiling water for the ever-present brick of noodles, the odd cup of tea. He trades, scores them gear when he can, when his credit isn’t too overstretched and Frank is in a good mood; rolls them fags from his own personal stash. He doesn’t share his heroin though, and every time he sneaks away to inject, he sends a prayer for death up into the frozen night along with his sigh. It’s too much, too long to wait.

\---

Nearly three years later, he’s run out of places to hide. Run out of money for petrol, mates with couches and odds and ends of food they won’t notice missing.

He’s got less than a quarter of a tank until the zero moment point, and somehow ends up on the coast road out of Dublin. He hasn’t been in years, not since Arthur died.

He figures it’s as good a place as any.

\---

There’s another car there when he pulls in, some sort of dingy sedan. He ignores them, stretches languorously and pisses in the weeds on the edge of the lot, and then spends the rest of the day sleeping in the trashed back seat. He hasn’t slept well in ages, too worried about gang members or cracked-out junkies or Frank’s henchmen trying to off him in the shadow of this week’s abandoned building. Out here, alone on a clean rectangle of asphalt, swept clear by the salty breeze, he feels safe.

The car is still there at night, when his friend Skinny pays him a visit. He’s got weed in a little baggy, and they roll a couple, smoking to keep away the chill. Skinny stays inside, out of the fuckin’ cold, where he can’t hear your fuckin’ music, Cathal, that shite you listen to.

He leans over when he sees Skinny eyeing his sort-of neighbour, cracks, “Not the confident type.” The guy - just one - was older and heavyset, and he’d tried to approach earlier that evening, but turned around halfway there, a shy lad at a party.

Skinny sticks his head out, offers, “Maybe he’s got some gear.”

Merlin can’t believe it. He snorts, “Does he look like a skaghead to you?” The guy is fifty if he’s a day, bundled in practical winter clothing. He keeps books in his boot; books and a plant in an honest-to-god ceramic pot.

Merlin leans back onto the windscreen, says “No, leave him for now” in response to the suggestion of a little light burglary, and for some reason actually hopes that Skinny will get the hint. That little plant.

He lies back against the windscreen, turns up the music loud enough to rattle his head and make him forget the ache of hunger. The dope calms the one behind his heart, for a little bit, and he stares up at the sky as it darkens and disappears.

\--

Fred doesn’t look him in the face for the first five minutes of their conversation. Merlin almost smiles at the irony. Back when he was the most powerful wizard in the world, capable of incinerating things on sight, everyone beat up on him, called him useless and idiot and generally treated him like a gangly weakling without a thought in his head. Now he’s a homeless druggie with bad teeth and muscle like rotted string, no magic to speak of and a broken heart, and this man is backing away slowly without eye contact.

He holds out his hand, “Glad to meet you, Fred,” because he is, he’s glad for any company now, especially this man with his sad puzzled look, like he’s asking the world how he ended up living in a car when he used to have a house and a family and a television in the lounge, a neat pile of newspapers on the hall table and a whole row of potted plants on the windowsill. Maybe he doesn’t do drugs, but he straightens his car for the eighth time and fixes the same clock over and over, and it’s just another way to escape. Merlin tells Fred that later, about escaping, floating easy and slow after enough dope to fell a horse. Fred snorts, and asks what does he have to complain about.

Merlin can’t answer, so Cathal does, offers the story about his mum and the cancer and his da and the prickishness, but the tears that threaten to spill over aren’t for them. Fred looks at him then, says, “Just because someone blames you or pushes you away, doesn’t mean you should let them.”

Merlin exhales into the night sky. It’s funny that he’s the one getting advice.

\---

Fred keeps dragging his feet in the matter of getting the public assistance and nailing the girl. Merlin can’t figure it out.

Jules is nice, fit and blonde with a choir group and a piano; she makes a lovely cup of tea, and smiles at Fred when he isn’t looking. She has a broken clock and a dead husband, Fred has a dead-and-buried relationship and a neat box of repair tools in his boot. Merlin recognises two kindred spirits when he sees them.

He makes it a goal - get Fred on the dole, get him to ask Jules out.  
  
Unfortunately, Fred makes his own goal right back. Get Cathal off the drugs and into one of the housing programmes. Merlin doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he isn’t going to end up staying in a hostel with bleached scratchy sheets and five other blokes in the same room, tugging at ill-fitting suits during pointless interviews where they’ll look at his record, no university, no past jobs, and offer the raised eyebrow and the door.

He’ll end up dead in a skip somewhere, caught finally by the cold endless winter or Frank’s henchmen or bad drugs.

He waits until Fred is gone, hands stuffed in his pockets and back hunched against the wind, before he shoots up in the front seat of his mum’s car. It can’t happen soon enough.

\---

It doesn’t. First Merlin gets the shit kicked out of him and gets his arse saved by none other than Fred, who apparently is an extra from a Bruce Lee film.

Then, starving and desperate and half out of his mind with cold and pain, Merlin finds himself wandering along streets he hasn’t walked in years. He turns the corner, and there is Cathal’s house.

There’s no attachment, no sense of home, but Merlin is starving and beaten, and despite how strongly his mind wishes for death, his body fights back. He breaks in, opens the refrigerator, and is scarfing leftover pizza and milk when Cathal’s dad comes down the stairs. For a second he holds the bat aloft, wavering slightly, even after he sees who it is.

When he goes, disgust rigid in the lines of his body, Merlin steals everything he can.

He loses some time, after that.

\---

The next thing he knows, he’s walking somewhere, not sure where, or when, except it’s dark and cold and there’s noise ahead. People. Merlin squints, makes out a bonfire, dark shapes around it, merging and drifting, blurring in the orange light.

He’s walking, but his hands are shaking and his feet won’t work, they carry him this way and that, and he can hear laughter. His ears are burning, but maybe that’s only the cold.

His skin is burning, too, and he scratches feebly. There’s fire in his veins, orange flames filling his vision, and the syringe glows where they’ve dropped it on his sunken chest. It takes all his strength to fumble it into his fingers, to roll up his sleeve and focus long enough to find his arm.

Fireworks explode, deafeningly loud, and there is a buzzing in his head, shards of glass in his eyes. The fire burns hot on his left side, along his arm and into his heart, and overhead there is only darkness. He's truly lost now, in the middle of a dark wood, lying far off the true path, well and truly gone.

The fireworks have gone silent, the bonfire dims, and he is falling into the sky, cold sliding up his hands, his feet, his legs, and the fire is almost out.

He thinks of Fred, and his clocks, and tempus fugit, and he wants to find him, to tell him that he’s flying now, it’s his turn, but the space behind his heart is a knot of ice, and he closes his eyes and lets go.


End file.
